THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

Different Approaches to Religious Diversity

(1) Reductive Naturalism: all religious beliefs about the transcendent or supernatural are false and religions involve human projections.

(2) Exclusivism: there is one true religion either doctrinally or as an effective path to salvation.

(3) Inclusivism: one religion contains the final truth, both doctrinally and as a path to salvation, but others approximate it.

(4) Pluralism: religious traditions experience God differently, but all are equally effective paths to salvation.

Theories of inclusivism and pluralism

(1) Deist Common Core: different religions share a common core of moral and religious doctrines.

(2) Roman Empire Big Sky: there is always room in the divine pantheon for one more god

(3) Buddhist Expedient Means: God devises different paths for different people in an emergency effort to save the world.

(4) Ancient Near East Henotheism: different nations and cultures have their own divine beings.

(5) Catholic inclusivism: salvation depends on Christ, but all humans share in this redemption.

(6) Mystical fact/interpretation: there is a common real experience of God which is distinct from specific religions’ interpretation of that experience.

(7) Baha’i Succession of prophets: God sends new prophets at critical junctures in human history.

(8) Phenomenal Symbols: Religions are human-created symbols that point to an unknowable (noumenal) ultimate being.

(9) Religious myth: all religions merely make mythical or poetical claims, not historical, factual truth-claims.

Arguments against inclusivism and pluralism

(1) Key doctrines of different religions are logically incompatible with each other.

(2) The truth of one particular religion can be demonstrated with logical certainty.

(3) The exclusive nature of a given religion is founded in the exclusive claims of a religious founder.

(4) Belief in an exclusive religion is warranted when it is founded on a reasonable belief mechanism (Plantinga: If there is a God who has endowed us with a faculty for coming to true religious beliefs, and if the exclusivist's beliefs issue from that faculty, her beliefs will be warranted).